Upset of the System
by Holly go lightly1
Summary: Severus brings home hist first serious girlfriend to a scornful family for the holidays to a house haunted by horror.


*Disclaimer: Not really my characters, most belong to J. K. Rowling. For further reading on these characters of my creation, read my fictions _Adolescence, fun? Who said that?_ and then _Through Grandmother's Thicket_, the latter a sequel and the previous a prelude. I care way too much about this.

Laudomia had seen two approaching figures in the sleet outside, so quickly shut the door to the oven, where a cut-rate roast spat oil nastily, and hastily scuttled towards the adjacent laundry room where there was a full-length mirror she alone knew of. The dress she wore was her finest, though to anyone else it would appear to be the same rag she used to polish the long, splintered wooden table in the tiny dining room. It had been buttercup-colored in her youth, but it was now of a vellum-like tincture in her fifties. It was horribly unstylish, and the once prosperous daughter of doting parents looked scornfully at the Peter Pan collar and wide matching belt and buttons. It drooped like wilted lettuce around her beanpole figure that hadn't an inch of a history of being notoriously shapely, though it had. Her fair skin was drawn and lined like onionskin; her frail black hair was still undeniably raven-colored, but had lost its gloss, and now the flip she had given the ends with a hot iron was beginning to sag. She heard the ominous knocker announce the presence of the two visitors, and she hastily drew definition into her slack lips with her only tube of lipstick: a garish ruby color. She stepped a few feet out of the laundry room and quietly opened the door to her son.

Her son Severus loomed forth like the Grim Reaper she so often came across in her fitful dreams. He was a gaunt stork of a thing, more miserable and tormented than she had seen him in his life. His hair had grown in uneven and shaggy since summer, where she had hastily cut it with gardening shears because of the outbreak of lice at home, but was knotted in various tangles in crude, dreadlock-like shapes. He had nothing in his hand but his small suitcase and he looked desperate and petrified, but utterly haughty. For a horrible moment, Laudomia hated her son.

"Hello, Mamma," he said brusquely, passing by her so quickly she barely felt the kiss atop her six-foot frame. "Is the fire going or do you need wood? I think Galatea was unpleasantly tricked into thinking it was a short walk from the train station."

Her son's longest term girlfriend had come home with him from school, and upon looking at her, Laudomia had a blink of a notion that he had been mistaken and had escorted some poor little foreigner home. She beheld the barely five feet tall, voluptuous Puerto Rican girl as an oddity in her world populated by the family of this house, who were all over six feet tall, emaciated, and Eastern European. 

Laudomia had only wanted to please her son, to make this visit pleasant enough to entice him home to stay. But her words preceded her good intentions when she blurted, "Will she need a stack of books to sit on at the table or a high-chair?"

The young woman gave Laudomia a look that was neither intimidated nor harsh, but rather that of a saint, who'd spent hours treading on fire ended with a trip in a lion's den. She looked apt to either give a skyward look to the Heavens or spurt a devious prophecy. But she silently removed the only coat her son had from her own body and then her own, where Severus swiftly took them into the laundry room and hung them up. 

"Your coat looks dirty," Laudomia yowled. "She trailed it in the dirt and snow, I don't want it next to the clean clothes."

"I'm putting them in my room," was the muffled reply as the only son she had descended the basement steps to his pit of a bedroom.

There was a brief moment of awkward appraisal as both women sized each other up. Though Laudomia had always been scornful of Galatea's type of body, she was not completely disgusted. Somehow, the petite figure carried her sizable hourglass figure efficiently enough without resembling a crude fertility doll. She had toasted pecan skin with minimal makeup, in which two uncharacteristically human eyes of Siamese-cat blue peered out wholesomely. She wore plain robes in a bitter cocoa color that mimicked her hair color. When she bared her wide chapped lips to speak, she had almost dog-like white teeth.

"You're Puerto Rican, yes?"

"Yes. And you're Russian, yes?"

"He's a little bit of everything." Severus mounted the stairs like a specter, barely touching the rotted floorboards. "Half Russian, thirty-percent Polish, the rest is German. It's why he's a hard worker." Severus loomed in the background. "And it's why he's reclusive." She glanced down at Galatea's lone valise. "I praise that you pack light. Are you as poor as we?"

"Mother--" her son began dangerously.

"I'm comfortable," Galatea said smoothly, looking down at her valise. 

"You're staying with us through the 25th, aren't you?"

"Yes, and we'll stay with my parents for the New Year," she finished as swiftly as a secretary.

Laudomia glided over towards the ancient stove to idly stir the cabbage boiling away sulkily. "You do know we don't celebrate Christmas, correct?"

"Yes."

"This is a Jewish household," she finished. "I am sure this will be your first Chanukah." She turned around like a serpent with the most devious leer. "I do hope you won't be too heartbroken for no Christmas presents."

"Oh, this is present enough," she returned with a seething handful of unforeseen sarcasm. "Where will I be staying?"

"I set up a cot in the downstairs bathroom."

"Stay in my bedroom," her son said with great conviction. "I'll take the bathroom."

Laudomia held one skeletal arm akimbo. "So sure of ourselves, aren't we, Severus? Upset not to share a room?"

"Oh, I would not need your authority to do so if it pleased me."

The last remark caught Laudomia as so atypical of her little backbiting coward that she forgot dinner for long enough to look a tad intimidated. She then waved it off as a stroke of luck and muttered very coherently, "Let us not forget our place in this house, Severus." She then spoke directly to the pair. "Why not sit for dinner? I shall call for Verona and your father, who are in the den."

When she returned with two looming kin behind her, Severus had already taken the seat opposite to the head of the table, his father's seat, and Galatea's valise was open. Glancing at her seat, Laudomia beheld an enormous textbook underneath Galatea as she sat to Severus' left without a hint of a smile.

Dinner alone would have set anyone in a foul mood. The roast, of course, was gristly and rare, menacingly dripping with blood. The cooked onions nestled in the pools of blood were scorched within an inch of their being. The tomato aspect quivered mournfully and was left untouched. The rolls were hard enough to build with. The pavlova, a rare enough occurrence because there were rarely desserts present for meals, was overly chewy and painfully thin, reared by a failed attempt to half the recipe. 

The company, however, was worse.

Laudomia and Severus, of course, we their same pleasant selves as they had been the moment they shared Galatea.

Verona, the only other "child" of the family, was never a treasure of a conversationalist. Nineteen, unwed, unemployed, unhindered, she dwelled in this house as a promiscuous parasite, going out and coming in on will. On her mother's strict instructions to dress appropriately, she had taken it to a ridiculous parody. She was wearing a dress befitting a Victorian doll, black velvet, full sleeves, skirt high above the knees, waist at the bust line, white stockings, black flats, and tiny baby uncultured pearls. Her hair was limp except for a half-hearted ribbon tied in her hair. She looked every inch the child she was. She complained bitterly about Chanukah and being poor and hating the family and hating the meal and hating all those "dirty bastards" who never called her back after one night of fun. She made hints of how rich and lucky Galatea was; she snidely recalled Severus in his younger years; she made scorching but seemingly innocent comments about how overweight Galatea was and how much she ate. 

Severus' father was no better. Though he spoke less than Verona, his lack of respect for the couple was more overt and more painful. The man with the Trotsky-like face and body would often interject the meal with statements like "When this little ingrate goes back to school…", "For all my life, I thought he was a fairy", "Young woman, you are ugly, but you are not ugly enough to have to settle for him", or, most memorably, "If you get her pregnant, you're not carrying the family name along with you." A Communist himself and a great bigot, he spoke of blood superiority, seeking confirmation every time Galatea's name was present that she was indeed pure blood, and therefore "at least partly good."

The battle between Galatea and this man was the only true sport in the evening, as Severus did not touch his food or speak, but rather sat with an empty plate and one hand supporting his chin, beetle-black eyes darting between the speaking Galatea and his speaking father.

Galatea was neither brave not timid, as before. She was blunt and vague, a spoon to the knife the family presented.

"What do you think about Communism?" the man of the house would ask snidely. "And what of Lenin, the greatest magical mind of both the magic and Muggle world?"

"Any government works but anarchy. Socialism is a wonderful ideal," she replied vaguely.

"And mud bloods?"

"Everything has its place. I don't know if the present system serves, but one can only assassinate a present norm with another."

"How about the works of Tom Riddle?" 

"Do you mean the Lenin of our time?"

Though this reply could have meant anything, Severus' father took it as a clear sign of intelligence and showed his makeshift approval for the girl, no longer taking potshots at the guest but aiming them at his son and wife, who he found inferior in all angles. But for the girl who deemed Riddle equal to Lenin and Lenin equal to Riddle, the Charlemagne of the House granted temporary cease fire.

"I only wish she wasn't marrying a pansy," was the last thing he said before he left the uncleared table and slunk off towards the den, followed by Verona. "Even if she is hideous," he trailed as an afterthought.

Hoping for some reconciliation with her son before he left, she did not chide his lack of appetite or remark on Galatea's sizeable one. When he merely took Galatea's valise and went down to his lair, Galatea took the book upon which she sat and followed him, not giving Laudomia or anything else in the tiny kitchen another thought. 

Laudomia was the only one to clear away the dishes and food, which was all saved except for the quivering tomato aspect, which she flung into the rubbish bin. She alone lit the Chanukah candles, which she did totally devoid of interest or homage. She gave more thought into touching up her lipstick, tossing aside her apron, and floating into the den where a record recording of Marx was calling out ominously. 


End file.
